Monday, 14 April 2014

In support of school band

In my family, spring means that it's time to look ahead to the
following school year and try to figure out what activities to sign up
for.Should we continue with
soccer?Add a new sport?Try a youth orchestra?It’s always challenging to accommodate
everyone’s interests while managing to not overschedule ourselves AND to stay
within our budget.We try to find
low-cost activities and ones that are in our neighbourhood or near the children’s
school.

We’ve been increasingly grateful for the programs that are
offered as options at the school itself.My children have participated in cross-country running, track and field,
school choir, and drama.And this past
year, Sophia, as a grade 5 student, was able to join the school band, playing
the oboe.It’s been great.The school band is convenient – right at the
school where we’re going anyway; it’s with her friends, so they get the
pleasure of playing music together; and, to be perfectly honest,the price is right.School band is free.(Well, free-ish.There’s a small fee, plus we have to rent the
oboe, and buy the books and reeds.) And band is going well.Her music teacher seems to be doing a fine
job of herding all these 10-year-old kids, all with completely different music
backgrounds and playing all sorts of different instruments, into a semblance of
a musical ensemble.

So I was completely unimpressed to hear that the Vancouver
School Board is proposing to eliminate their elementary school band and strings
programs in an effort to save money.Argh.

This is happening everywhere, I know.Music programs are among the first to be cut
when there are budgetary concerns.The
decision-makers can very clearly see that reading and math are good for kids, but
many believe that the arts programs are “fluff”, dispensable.So I thought I’d spend a little time today
putting together a list of the strong scientific evidence for the positive
effects of musical training on cognition and well-being.Ammunition, if you will, for fighting in
favour of music programs in the schools.

Before I get to that, I feel that should add a caveat.While I definitely believe that musical
training has cognitive benefits, that is not why I enrol my children in music
lessons.Music offers us an unparalleled
access to joy, a vehicle for self-expression, and, by playing in a group, an
opportunity to be part of something bigger than ourselves.Musical training is a gift we give our children,
like learning to read, or learning to understand the world around us.It should be part of the educational program,
so that no child is excluded from the multitude of benefits that learning to
make music offers.

Benefits of Musical Training on Cognitive Function and Emotional Well-Being

Musical training enhances brainstem auditory responses to both speech and music. Musicians have better encoding of pitch information in speech, which is important for understanding what is being said, as well as the emotional content of speech. (Musacchia et al.,2007; Strait et al., 2009)

Musicians are better able to filter away background noise, and so can better encode and understand speech in the presence of background noise (Parbery-Clark et al., 2009)

Adults who had musical training as a child (but did not necessarily continue playing music as an adult) still have better brainstem responses to sound. This indicates that changes in the brain in response to early musical training are long-lasting.(Skoe and Kraus, 2012)

Musical training protects against the normal age-related decline in auditory processing. Older musicians show the same accurate processing of sounds as young people. This effect of musical training is not limited to professional or life-long-musicians. Even a few years of musical training during childhood had a protective effect on auditory processing in seniors, even 50 years later. (Parbery-Clark et al., 2012; White-Schwoch et al., 2013)

University students with musical training before the age of 12 had better verbal memory than people with no musical training (Chan et al., 1998)

Children with at least 3 years of musical training performed better on vocabulary tests than children with no musical training.There was a positive correlation between duration of musical study and performance on test; in other words, the longer the child had studied music, the more likely she was to do well on the vocabulary test. (Forgeard et al., 2008)

A six-month study on 8-year-olds found that children given music lessons improved their reading abilities more than children given painting lessons (Moreno et al., 2009).

In 4- and 5-year-old children, music skills were found to correlate with phonological awareness and reading development. “Music perception appears to tap auditory mechanisms related to reading”. (Anvari et al., 2002)

In university students, the ability to recognize differences in pitch contour (shape of a melody) correlated with reading ability. “Acoustic perception constrains the development of phonological skill and literacy acquisition”. (Foxton et al., 2003)

Improvements in verbal skills were seen in 4- to 6-year old children after only 20 days of musical training using a computer program. (Moreno et al., 2011)

Orchestra musicians perform better than non-musicians on a task of 3-D mental rotation. Imaging studies showed this mental task was accompanied by activation in Broca’s area in addition to the regular activation in visuospatial areas of the brain. (Sluming et al, 2007)

Children given 6 months of piano training had improved spatial-temporal reasoning abilities and were faster at learning proportional math concepts taught in a video-game format. ( Graziano et al.,1999)

Cheek and Smith (1999) report that grade 8 students who have had at least 2 years of private music training score better on the mathematics portion of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills than students with no private music training. In addition, they found that students whose lessons were on a keyboard instrument have better math skills than those whose music lessons were not keyboard related.

Musicians doing mental math use different parts of the brain than non-musicians: there is more activation in the left fusiform gyrus (used for shape processing) and the left prefrontal cortex (which is the site for working memory). (Schmidthorst and Holland, 2004)

Musical training
leads to improvements in executive function:attention, discipline, and working memory:

Children given twenty sessions of musical training over a month showed an improvement on an executive function task testing working memory and response inhibition. (Moreno et al., 2011)

Young adults who were musical performers showed better performance than non-musicians on two tasks measuring executive function. (Bialystok and Depape, 2009)

Professional musicians perform better than amateurs on the Stroop test, a measure of selective attention and cognitive flexibility. (Travis, 2011)

Musical training can be used to offset the decline in executive function that can occur with aging. Seniors given six months of piano lessons had significantly improved scores on executive function test of planning and working memory. (Bugos et al., 2007)

Musical training has
a small effect in increasing overall IQ:

A year-long study in Toronto showed that children who were given musical training had a slightly greater increase in overall IQ compared children who were not given music lessons. (Schellenberg, 2004)

High school students studying music have better grades in virtually all subjects (Cabanac et al., 2013)

Making music improves mood, decreases levels of stress hormones, and boosts
the immune system:

Musically-trained university students had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol before a math exam compared to non-musician students, suggesting that musically-trained students more emotionally stable. (Laohawattanakun et al., 2011)

Non-musicians showed improved mood (using a questionnaire) after singing in a group for 30 minutes(Unwin et al., 2002)

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About Me

Tara Gaertner is a neuroscientist, music educator, writer and speaker. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Music from McGill University and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Texas, Houston. She has taught piano, flute, and music theory since 1988 and currently teaches the Music for Young Children program as well as private piano and flute lessons. She is an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia, lecturing on Neuroscience in the department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy.